Officials feared lost dog may have frozen after car crash

Published 3:49 pm, Tuesday, December 27, 2011

It was all they wanted for Christmas -- to have the black Lab-German Shepherd mix come home.

For five days, she was missing; 9-year-old Tundra was nowhere to be found.

In the early morning hours of Dec. 17, about 2:30 a.m., staff with the Lone Star Sanctuary for Animals said a car swerved when traveling down North Fairgrounds Road, over-corrected and rolled into the organization’s fence. It took out 50 feet of fencing and destroyed three fields where animals were kept. The vehicle landed on top of a dog house where two semi-feral dogs lived.

Both dogs escaped from the shelter. Then, Moses, a German Shepherd-mix who’s lived at the shelter for four years, was found nearby and it took staff and volunteers approximately three-and-a-half hours to get him back to the sanctuary.

Tundra, who came to Lone Star eight years ago, still was missing. For three days after her disappearance, volunteers borrowed a golf cart from the Hogan Golf Course and looked around the course, along Loop 250 and down Scharbauer Draw for her. Still nothing.

Shelter Manager Beth Armstrong estimated they received about 30 calls a day from people nearby who saw her and recognized the bright red tag with Lone Star’s phone number on it. She seemed to always be in the area but never captured.

By last Thursday, Executive Director Kirk French was getting worried. He knew she had been without food and water for five days except for what she was probably scavenging. He knew she probably had injuries from the accident and the truck landing on her house.

“I turned to Beth and told her, ‘The only thing I want for Christmas is to find Tundra’,” he said.

They weren’t giving up but were starting to get more worried, Armstrong added. With the predicted snow in the forecast, Armstrong was afraid that if the dog wasn’t found soon it would be too late for her with the cold weather approaching. If she was injured and stuck in the snow, she might not survive.

But that afternoon around 3 p.m., one of the shelter volunteers found her behind the property. She was taken to Medical Veterinary Services to be checked out.

Her naval cavity had been cracked and her optical cavity broken. Doctors are unsure if she’ll be able to see in her left eye again. She had no other broken bones from the accident but will spend the next week recovering at the clinic, Armstrong said.

“She hasn’t been adopted out. She’s never had anyone ask or show interest in her before. She hasn’t known anything other than this place. I’m sure it was a pretty scary thing for her,” Armstrong said. “We were very lucky to find her.”